CES Letter Answers

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KJV Errors ​

The claim:

"What are 1769 King James Version edition errors doing in the Book of Mormon? A purported ancient text? Errors which are unique to the 1769 edition that Joseph Smith owned?"[1]

The CES Letter also argues that KJV italicized words and KJV mistranslations appear unchanged in the Book of Mormon — claims covered in dedicated sister articles on KJV Italics and KJV Mistranslations.[2][3]

Which errors are actually "unique to 1769"?

The "1769 edition" claim ​

The claim falls apart on inspection ​

The CES Letter asserts these errors are "unique to the 1769 edition that Joseph Smith owned." It never demonstrates this. Not once. No specific error is shown to exist in the 1769 edition but not in earlier printings.

Take Isaiah 2:16 — the most commonly cited example. The KJV renders the Hebrew sekiyyot as "pleasant pictures" when it actually refers to ships or vessels.[4]

EditionIsaiah 2:16
1611 KJV"And vpon all the ships of Tarshish, and vpon all pleasant pictures."
1769 KJV"And upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures."

Same mistranslation. The only differences are spelling and typesetting — vpon became upon. The "error" has been there since 1611.[5]

FAIR examined the CES Letter's full list and concluded: "There are no errors that are unique to the 1769 edition."[6] What the 1769 Blayney revision actually changed was spelling, typesetting, and which words were italicized — not the underlying translation.[7]

Royal Skousen's definitive analysis found the KJV text used in the Book of Mormon matches editions from the 1670s or later based on substantive differences, and from the 1770s when italics changes are included — he identified the 1775 edition as the likely source.[8] That means the Book of Mormon tracks a specific post-1770 KJV edition. It doesn't mean the CES Letter's claim about "1769 errors" is right — the errors themselves are centuries older.

Bottom line: The CES Letter's headline claim — "errors unique to the 1769 edition" — is factually wrong. The same translation choices appear in the 1611 KJV and every edition after it.

What copying can't explain ​

The KJV claims focus on what's similar between the Book of Mormon and the Bible. The differences tell a different story.

Dead Sea Scroll alignments ​

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 — more than a century after the Book of Mormon was published. Several Book of Mormon Isaiah readings that diverge from the KJV were confirmed by these ancient manuscripts:

PassageKJVBook of MormonAncient manuscript support
Isaiah 48:11 / 1 Nephi 20:11"how should my name be polluted?""I will not suffer my name to be polluted"1QIsa-a, Vulgate, and Targum support the first-person form
Isaiah 48:13 / 1 Nephi 20:13(lacks conjunction)adds "and"1QIsa-a, LXX, and Syriac all add "and"
Isaiah 2:16 / 2 Nephi 12:16"ships of Tarshish""ships of the sea, and upon all the ships of Tarshish"LXX reads "sea"; both lines likely original, one lost through scribal error
Isaiah 50:2 / 2 Nephi 7:2"their fish stinketh""their fish to stink because the waters are dried up"1QIsa-a reads "dry up"; the BOM combines KJV "stink" with the DSS "dried up" element — a hybrid reading drawing on both traditions[9]

Joseph Smith published these readings in 1830. He couldn't read Greek. The first English translation of the Septuagint (Thomson, 1808) had a print run of just 1,000 sets — most went unsold and very few complete sets survive today.[10] The widely available Brenton translation didn't appear until 1844. The Dead Sea Scrolls wouldn't be found for another 117 years.

A skeptic can note that the Thomson Septuagint existed and was in English. That's fair. But the question isn't whether a single copy might have been physically locatable somewhere in America. It's whether a young man in Palmyra, New York — who didn't know Jerusalem had walls — obtained a rare four-volume scholarly set, identified the specific verses where it diverged from his KJV, and wove those readings into a dictated text with no notes and no revision. The Dead Sea Scroll alignments are even harder to explain this way, since those manuscripts were buried in caves until 1947.

The variant scorecard ​

Tvedtnes analyzed 234 Isaiah variants between the Book of Mormon and the KJV, rating each based on ancient manuscript evidence:[9:1]

RatingCount
Favor the Book of Mormon59
Neutral126
Favor the KJV49

A 19th-century plagiarist working from a KJV Bible should produce the opposite pattern — zero readings that align with manuscripts he didn't know existed, and all variants trending away from ancient witnesses. The margin — 59 to 49 — is modest. But the direction is impossible under a plagiarism model.

Archaic Hebrew forms ​

2 Nephi 20:29 reads "Ramath" where the KJV has "Ramah." John Tvedtnes interpreted this as the older Hebrew feminine suffix (-ath) that fell out of use over centuries. The Dead Sea Scroll scribe actually added this same suffix as a superscript correction to his copy — suggesting even the ancient copyist's source had the older form.[9:2]

Royal Skousen offers a different explanation: "Ramath" may be a scribal error by Oliver Cowdery, influenced by the proximity of "Aiath" (v. 28) and "Hamath" (v. 9).[8:1] The evidence is contested. But scribal errors don't typically restore archaic Hebrew morphology confirmed by ancient manuscripts — especially a suffix that a Dead Sea Scroll copyist independently corrected his own text to include.

A hidden Hebraism ​

At 2 Nephi 12:2 (Isaiah 2:2), the Book of Mormon uniquely reads "when" instead of "that." Paul Hoskisson demonstrated this creates a Hebrew waw functioning as "then" — a protasis-apodosis construction found in Gesenius's Hebrew grammar.[11] The simplest English explanation is a trivial word substitution. But the substitution happens to produce a construction that works in Hebrew in ways the KJV reading doesn't. Joseph Smith had no Hebrew training until years later.

Missing text restored ​

At 1 Nephi 21:1, the Book of Mormon adds an entire poetic preface to Isaiah 49:1 that doesn't appear in the KJV. The addition has chiastic structure — a Hebrew literary form whose systematic study began with Nils Lund in 1930.[9:3][12] Joseph Smith published this in 1830. Lund wouldn't describe the pattern for another century.

The Masoretic Text appears to have lost words in several places through haplography — a scribal error where similar-looking words cause a copyist's eye to skip ahead, dropping a line. Tvedtnes identified multiple cases where the Book of Mormon preserves the fuller reading, confirmed by the Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, or other ancient witnesses.[9:4]

Early Modern English that predates the KJV ​

Stanford Carmack's research identifies grammatical structures in the Book of Mormon that predate the King James Bible and were extinct by 1829. These aren't KJV borrowings — they're older than the KJV.[13]

FeatureBook of MormonKJVPseudo-biblical texts (1774-1816)
Periphrastic did (past tense)24%1.2%Never matching BOM
Personal which52%12.6%Low
Finite complement after command77.2%25.5%25.7%
Lest-shall construction14 instances (17x Bible rate)Rare0 instances

Joseph Smith's own 1832 manuscript shows modern English grammar — not the archaic patterns found throughout the Book of Mormon.[14] Pseudo-biblical authors of his era produced measurably less archaic syntax. Over 90 archaic lexical items in the Book of Mormon had meanings dating from the 1530s-1730s, and these usages do not appear in the KJV — ruling out the King James Bible as their source.[15]

If Joseph copied the KJV, where did the pre-KJV English come from?

Hebraisms not derivable from the KJV ​

The if-and conditional is the clearest example. Mosiah 2:21's original manuscript reads: "if ye should serve him with your whole soul — and yet ye would be unprofitable servants." This construction appears nowhere in the KJV. Donald Parry: "The Book of Mormon's use of Hebraistic literary forms cannot simply be attributed to Joseph Smith's familiarity with the English Bible."[16]

The if-and conditional appears 7 times in Helaman 12:13-21 alone. Later editors removed it — they didn't recognize it. If Joseph invented the text, why would he insert a grammatical construction invisible to English readers, one his own editors deleted?

Other Hebraisms include cognate accusatives ("dreamed a dream," "cursed with a sore cursing") and construct-state word order ("works of righteousness" rather than "righteous works").[16:1]

The original manuscript shows dictation, not copying ​

Royal Skousen's analysis of the original manuscript reveals errors characteristic of hearing, not reading:[17]

  • "Coriantumr" was initially written "Coriantummer" — a phonetic mishearing. No English word ends in "mr." Joseph was spelling out letters from a visionary text, not reading from a page.
  • Fourteen Hebrew-like conditional clauses use "and" instead of "then" — a non-English pattern that survived in the original manuscript before later editors removed it.

No Bible was present during translation. Emma Smith: "He had neither manuscript nor book to read from."[18] Oliver Cowdery purchased a Bible on October 8, 1829 — months after the translation was completed in late June.[19]

The relevant objection: perhaps Joseph didn't need a Bible open during dictation. Perhaps he'd studied and memorized significant portions of Isaiah beforehand. But the eyewitness evidence and his demonstrated ignorance of basic biblical geography (he didn't know Jerusalem had walls) make extensive prior memorization of 21 Isaiah chapters — with systematic modifications — difficult to sustain.

Nephi's Isaiah is woven, not pasted ​

A person plagiarizing copies text. Nephi selects specific Isaiah chapters, frames them with commentary, modifies them for his theological purpose, and brackets the entire block with literary devices.

Isaiah 48-49 mirror the family's displacement from Jerusalem — water from rocks in the desert (48:21), peace "as a river" (48:18) echoing Lehi naming the river Laman.[20] Isaiah 2-14 follows a four-stage prophetic framework (Christ's coming, Israel's scattering, the Gentile era, restoration) that isn't laid out in Isaiah itself — someone had to construct it.[21]

When Nephi reaches Isaiah 29, he doesn't just quote. He adapts the language using a pesher method — ancient Jewish interpretive commentary found in the Dead Sea Scrolls — transforming Isaiah's symbolic "sealed book" into a specific prophecy about the Book of Mormon's own coming forth.[22] The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. Pesher interpretation was only identified after those scrolls were studied. Joseph Smith in 1829 had no access to the Dead Sea Scrolls and no knowledge of pesher methodology.

The entire Isaiah block in 2 Nephi is bracketed by an inclusio: 2 Nephi 5:30-31 ("which are good in my sight") and 2 Nephi 25:7-8 ("for their good have I written them"). The Egyptian name Nephi itself means "good" — a wordplay echoing through the framing.[23] At 2 Nephi 12:12 and 12:14, Nephi added clauses absent from the Hebrew Masoretic Text, universalizing Isaiah's judgment imagery to apply to "all nations" — matching his stated purpose in 2 Nephi 25:3.[24]

The real question: why KJV language at all? ​

Strip away the "1769" framing and a legitimate question remains. The Book of Mormon's Isaiah chapters follow the KJV closely. Some KJV translation choices are wrong. Why would an ancient text, independently translated, reproduce those choices?

What the "errors" actually are ​

FAIR cataloged 91 alleged translation errors in the Book of Mormon's biblical quotations and sorted them.[25]

CategoryExampleWhat's actually happening
Diachronic language shiftsIsaiah 3:8 / 2 Nephi 13:8: "provoke" vs. modern "rebel against""Provoke" meant "to challenge" in 1611 English. The word narrowed over 400 years. Not a mistranslation — older English.
Genuine errors that don't change meaningIsaiah 3:2-3 / 2 Nephi 13:2-3: "prudent" (actually "diviner"), "eloquent orator" (actually "skilled enchanter")Real errors. Isaiah's point — God stripping Jerusalem of all its leaders — is unchanged. But the errors are still there.

Some of these are legitimate translation variants where the Hebrew is ambiguous. Others are correct translations of older manuscripts — the Book of Mormon's "ships of the sea" at 2 Nephi 12:16 is absent from the Hebrew Masoretic Text but present in the Septuagint.[10:1]

And some are genuine mistranslations. "Pleasant pictures" for Hebrew sekiyyot (ships) and "eloquent orator" for nachash lachash (skilled enchanter) are simply wrong. If the Book of Mormon were a fully independent translation, these specific English errors shouldn't appear.

The 46% overlap and the 54% that diverges ​

The most basic test for copying: does the text match?

StudyIsaiah verses examinedIdentical to KJVModified
Gibson (1995)433~46%~54%
Tvedtnes (1981)478201 (42%)207 (43%), plus ~70 paraphrased or mixed
Ellertson (2001)433217 (50%)216 (50%), containing 370 total variants

Three studies, same pattern: roughly half the Isaiah verses diverge from the KJV in some way.[26][9:5][27]

The 46% verbatim overlap demands explanation. No two independent translations of the same Hebrew source would produce that much word-for-word agreement — the overlap comes from the KJV itself. The faithful explanation isn't "the texts are unrelated." It's that the translation used KJV language as its English vehicle where the underlying texts aligned. Blake Ostler's expansion theory — the earliest formal articulation of this model — proposed exactly this: the Book of Mormon's English is a modern expansion of an ancient source, with KJV phrasing serving as the medium for passages the texts shared.[28]

The 54% that diverges matters too. Many modifications are small — a word changed, a phrase added — but the pattern of those changes is significant. They cluster around italicized words (see KJV Italics) and around passages where ancient manuscripts preserve different readings. That distribution isn't what you'd expect from a copyist making random alterations to disguise plagiarism. It's what you'd expect from a text that shares a common ancestor with the KJV but comes through a different transmission path.

Hard questions ​

The CES Letter's version of this criticism is easy to answer. The scholarly version is harder. Intellectual honesty requires engaging it.

Wright and the italics pattern ​

David P. Wright's argument is the most rigorous textual case for KJV dependence.[29] His key evidence: italicized words account for only 3.6% of the KJV Isaiah text but generate 22-38% of the Book of Mormon's variants. Stan Spencer refined this to a 40:1 omission ratio.[30] Wright argues this statistical signature proves someone was working directly from a printed KJV.

Spencer's "Missing Words" hypothesis offers a response. If the text Joseph received had already been through a translation layer that stripped italicized words — because they weren't in the source language — Joseph's attempts to fill the gaps would produce exactly this pattern: high omission rates, broken grammar, inconsistent treatment, and later corrections.

The 1831 Sun newspaper independently records Martin Harris saying Joseph "should omit all the words in the Bible that were printed in Italic."[31] Under the Missing Words hypothesis, this corroborates a translation mechanism that stripped italic words. Under the copying model, it describes someone reading from a physical KJV and skipping italicized words. The evidence is genuinely ambiguous.

Wright's critique doesn't account for Book of Mormon readings confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his italics evidence is real. The full statistical analysis is at KJV Italics.

English polysemy variants ​

Wright identifies cases where Book of Mormon variants seem to arise from the multiple meanings of English words rather than from Hebrew. At Isaiah 2:10, the KJV reads "for fear of the Lord" where "for" is a causal preposition (meaning "because of"). The Book of Mormon shifts it into a subject phrase — a variant that exploits the ambiguity of the English word "for" but not the Hebrew mippenei, which is unambiguous.

The expansion theory could account for this if the translation operated through English. But the variant exploits English ambiguity, not Hebrew, and that's hard to dismiss.

Genuine KJV translation errors ​

A handful of KJV translation choices in the Book of Mormon are not defensible as "legitimate variants" or "diachronic shifts." The expansion theory offers a framework: God used familiar KJV phrasing where the texts aligned, and the translation carried some KJV-specific choices along with it. But that also means the English text is not a word-for-word rendering of the plates — it's mediated through a translation process that drew on existing English scripture.

The Deutero-Isaiah question ​

The CES Letter doesn't explicitly raise this. The strongest form of the KJV criticism does.

Mainstream biblical scholarship holds that Isaiah 40-55 was written during the Babylonian exile (c. 550-539 BCE) — roughly 50-60 years after Lehi left Jerusalem (c. 600 BCE). The evidence includes a complete thematic shift at chapter 40, a new audience, distinctive vocabulary and theology, and Cyrus named by name (Isaiah 44:28, 45:1).[32]

The Book of Mormon quotes from Isaiah 48-54 (1 Nephi 20-21, 2 Nephi 7-8). If those chapters didn't exist before the exile, Nephi couldn't have had them on the brass plates. Colby Townsend extends the problem: even Isaiah 2-14 underwent post-exilic editorial layering. Grant Hardy, a faithful Latter-day Saint scholar, concedes that "even chapters 1-39 underwent considerable revision and augmentation after 600 BCE."[32:1][33]

The common apologetic response — "scholars who divide Isaiah don't believe in prophecy" — is, in Hardy's words, "an inadequate (and inaccurate) response to a significant body of detailed historical and literary analysis."[32:2] Many scholars who accept multiple authorship are believing Christians.

The harder edge: Deutero-Isaiah phrases appear not just in quoted chapters but in the Book of Mormon's own original compositions — Lehi's sermon adapts Isaiah 52:1-2, Abinadi quotes Isaiah 53 in full, Jesus quotes Isaiah 52 in 3 Nephi 20, and Moroni adapts Isaiah 52 language at the book's close.

Several responses have weight. The brass plates aren't the Masoretic Text — different manuscript traditions preserve different material, and the Dead Sea Scrolls proved that pre-Masoretic Isaiah texts existed with readings the Masoretic tradition lost.[9:6] The expansion theory addresses why KJV phrasing appears: D&C 1:24 describes God speaking "after the manner of their language," which already implies the English text is adapted to its audience. If the translation was expansive enough to use familiar scriptural language, it could render what ancient authors said using post-exilic phrases the modern audience would recognize. The Isaian school model — Daniel Ellsworth argues for "a core set of Isaianic writings that were sealed up by Isaiah's disciples (Isaiah 8:16) and then opened, assembled, expanded, and redacted over centuries."[34] This can't fully account for Cyrus named by name in Isaiah 45, but it reframes the question from "was all of Isaiah written by one person?" to "what did the brass plates actually contain?"

The Deutero-Isaiah Difficulty

The evidence for composite authorship is substantial. The best faithful responses reframe the problem rather than eliminate it. These are real questions that deserve more scholarly attention from believing scholars — and they arise from taking the evidence seriously, not from ignoring it.

The tight/loose translation dilemma ​

Eyewitness accounts describe tight control — Joseph reading specific words that appeared on the seer stone, the stone not advancing until the scribe had it right. But tight divine control should produce better readings than the KJV, not identical errors. If the translation was loose enough for KJV phrasing to serve as a vehicle, the tight-control accounts need reinterpreting.

No current translation theory resolves every piece of evidence simultaneously. The expansion theory comes closest — accommodating KJV language, meaningful departures, archaic English, and ancient manuscript alignments. It requires accepting that the Book of Mormon's English text is a divinely mediated rendering, not a mechanical transcript of plate language. Brant Gardner developed this into a comprehensive translation theory.[35]

The italics pattern and the JST question ​

The CES Letter raises two additional claims that deserve direct engagement. Both are covered in depth in dedicated sister articles.

KJV italicized words ​

Italicized KJV words — translator-supplied words not in the original Hebrew — are omitted from the Book of Mormon at 40 times the rate of non-italicized words. The result is broken English like "Wo me! for I undone" that no copyist would write. The CES Letter presents two examples where italicized words appear and treats them as proof of copying. The full statistical picture tells the opposite story.[30:1]

The pattern, the broken grammar, the 1837 corrections, and the 1831 eyewitness account are analyzed in full at KJV Italics.

Book of Mormon vs. JST ​

The claim that the Book of Mormon "should match" the JST assumes the JST is a word-for-word restoration of original biblical text. Leading JST scholars reject that premise — Kent Jackson describes it as "recasting the text into a new form by means of inspiration."[36] The 3 Nephi Sermon on the Mount has dozens of deliberate theological changes from Matthew, and at least one — omitting "without a cause" in 3 Nephi 12:22 — aligns with the earliest Greek manuscripts against the KJV. The full analysis is at KJV Mistranslations.

The book still exists ​

Every KJV-related criticism, even if granted in full, concerns roughly 6-7% of the Book of Mormon's text — the biblical quotations.[37] The rest — roughly 270,000 words of narrative, theology, proper names, internal geography, Hebraisms, chiastic structures — remains.

The CES Letter's implicit argument is that KJV dependence in the Isaiah chapters undermines the entire book's translation claims. That's a logical leap.

A book dictated in around 60 working days with no outline, no notes, and no substantive revisions still needs its own explanation.[17:1] Pre-KJV English grammar that neither Joseph Smith nor any pseudo-biblical author of his era could produce. Hebraisms invisible to English readers, removed by later editors who didn't recognize them. Readings confirmed by ancient manuscripts buried in caves until 1947.

The KJV overlap is a real feature of the text. So is everything pointing the other direction.

Bottom line: The "1769 edition errors" claim is factually wrong — the errors exist in every KJV edition back to 1611. Over half the Isaiah verses are modified, not copied. Several readings match ancient manuscripts discovered a century later. The KJV overlap raises legitimate questions about translation — but so does every piece of evidence the copying theory can't explain.

  1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," nos. 1-3, pp. 9-11. ↩︎

  2. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 2, pp. 9-10. ↩︎

  3. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 3, pp. 10-11. ↩︎

  4. Dana M. Pike and David Rolph Seely, "'Upon All the Ships of the Sea, and Upon All the Ships of Tarshish': Revisiting 2 Nephi 12:16 and Isaiah 2:16," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 12-25. The Hebrew sekiyyot is cognate with Ugaritic tkt (a type of ship). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol14/iss2/4/ ↩︎

  5. The Holy Bible: A Facsimile in a Reduced Size of the Authorized Version Published in the Year 1611, ed. Alfred W. Pollard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911). The 1611 text reads "And vpon all the ships of Tarshish, and vpon all pleasant pictures" — identical to the 1769 text except for standardized spelling. Available at https://archive.org/details/holybiblefacsimi00polluoft ↩︎

  6. "Detailed Response to CES Letter, Book of Mormon," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Detailed_response_to_CES_Letter,_Book_of_Mormon ↩︎

  7. F.H.A. Scrivener, The Authorized Version of the English Bible (1611): Its Subsequent Reprints and Modern Representatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1884). Scrivener documented that the 1769 Blayney revision primarily standardized spelling, updated typesetting, and revised italics — not the underlying translation. ↩︎

  8. Royal Skousen, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, Part Five: The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: FARMS/BYU Studies, 2019). Skousen identified 36 direct KJV quotations and 83 paraphrastic quotations, collating all 36 against the KJV across 143 pages. ↩︎ ↩︎

  9. John A. Tvedtnes, "The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon," FARMS Preliminary Report (1981). Analyzed 234 variants: 59 favor BOM, 126 neutral, 49 favor KJV. https://scripturecentral.org/archive/presentations/report/isaiah-variants-book-mormon. See also Tvedtnes, "Isaiah in the Bible and the Book of Mormon," FARMS Review 16, no. 2 (2004). https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/isaiah-bible-and-book-mormon ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. The first English translation of the Septuagint was Charles Thomson's, published in Philadelphia in 1808 in a print run of just 1,000 sets — most went unsold. Very few complete sets survive; as early as 1846, Thomas Horne noted the work had "become very scarce and dear" even in America. The widely available Brenton translation did not appear until 1844. Greek editions were expensive Oxford scholarly works. Joseph Smith could not read Greek; his first documented contact with the language was late 1835. See John W. Welch, "Joseph Smith's Awareness of Greek and Latin," in Approaching Antiquity (Provo, UT: RSC, BYU, 2015), 303-28. https://rsc.byu.edu/approaching-antiquity-joseph-smith-ancient-world/joseph-smiths-awareness-greek-latin ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. Paul Y. Hoskisson, "Was Joseph Smith Smarter Than the Average Fourth Year Hebrew Student? Finding a Restoration-Significant Hebraism in Book of Mormon Isaiah," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 17 (2016): 151-158. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/was-joseph-smith-smarter-than-the-average-fourth-year-hebrew-student-finding-a-restoration-significant-hebraism-in-book-of-mormon-isaiah ↩︎

  12. Nils W. Lund, "The Presence of Chiasmus in the New Testament," The Journal of Religion 10 (1930): 74-93. Lund's systematic identification of chiastic structures in ancient texts began Western scholarly analysis of the form. ↩︎

  13. Stanford Carmack, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?" Interpreter 28 (2018): 177-232. Examines syntactic domains where BOM diverges from both KJV and pseudo-biblical texts. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/is-the-book-of-mormon-a-pseudo-archaic-text ↩︎

  14. Stanford Carmack, "How Joseph Smith's Grammar Differed from Book of Mormon Grammar: Evidence from the 1832 History," Interpreter 25 (2017). https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar-evidence-from-the-1832-history ↩︎

  15. Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack identified 90+ lexical items with meanings dating from 1530s-1730s. These archaic usages do not appear in the KJV. See "Archaic Vocabulary," Evidence Central. https://scripturecentral.org/evidence/archaic-vocabulary. See also Skousen and Carmack, The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon, Parts 3-4 of Volume III of the Critical Text Project (Provo, UT: FARMS/BYU Studies, 2018). ↩︎

  16. Donald W. Parry, "Hebraisms and Other Ancient Peculiarities in the Book of Mormon," in Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon, ed. Donald W. Parry, Daniel C. Peterson, and John W. Welch (Provo, UT: FARMS, 2002). See also "Why Are There Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon?" Scripture Central. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-are-there-hebraisms-in-the-book-of-mormon ↩︎ ↩︎

  17. Royal Skousen, "How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 22-31. https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/how-joseph-smith-translated-book-mormon-evidence-original-manuscript ↩︎ ↩︎

  18. Emma Smith, interview by Joseph Smith III, February 1879. Published in Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289-290. "He had neither manuscript nor book to read from... If he had had anything of the kind he could not have concealed it from me." ↩︎

  19. Oliver Cowdery's Bible was purchased from the Palmyra bookseller E.B. Grandin on October 8, 1829. The Book of Mormon translation was completed by late June 1829. See Royal Skousen, "How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 27. ↩︎

  20. S. Kent Brown, "What Is Isaiah Doing in First Nephi?" in From Jerusalem to Zarahemla: Literary and Historical Studies of the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: RSC, BYU, 1998). https://rsc.byu.edu/jerusalem-zarahemla/what-isaiah-doing-first-nephi-how-did-lehis-family-fare-so-far-home ↩︎

  21. John W. Welch, "Getting through Isaiah with the Help of the Nephite Prophetic View," in Donald W. Parry and John W. Welch, eds., Isaiah in the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1998), 19-45. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/what-vision-guides-nephis-choice-of-isaiah-chapters ↩︎

  22. Robert A. Cloward, "Isaiah 29 and the Book of Mormon," in Parry and Welch, eds., Isaiah in the Book of Mormon (1998). https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-does-nephi-use-isaiah-29-as-part-of-his-own-prophecy ↩︎

  23. Matthew L. Bowen, "'For Their Good Have I Written Them': The Onomastic Allusivity and Literary Function of 2 Nephi 25:8," Interpreter 53 (2022): 77-90. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/for-their-good-have-i-written-them-the-onomastic-allusivity-and-literary-function-of-2-nephi-258/ ↩︎

  24. Matthew L. Bowen, "'Upon All the Nations': The goyim in Nephi's Rendition of Isaiah 2 (2 Nephi 12)," Interpreter 67 (2025): 201-228. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/upon-all-the-nations-the-goyim-in-nephis-rendition-of-isaiah-2-2-nephi-12-in-literary-context ↩︎

  25. "KJV Translation Errors in the Book of Mormon," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/KJV_translation_errors_in_the_Book_of_Mormon ↩︎

  26. Stephen W. Gibson, "Does The Book of Mormon Quote the King James Bible?," in One-Minute Answers to Anti-Mormon Questions (Bountiful, UT: Horizon Publishers, 1995). Gibson found that of 433 Isaiah verses quoted in the Book of Mormon, 46% are identical to the KJV while 54% are modified. ↩︎

  27. Carol F. Ellertson, "The Isaiah Passages in the Book of Mormon: A Non-Aligned Text" (MA thesis, BYU, 2001). Of 433 Isaiah verses, 216 (50%) contain 370 variants: 76 agree with LXX, 28 with Qumran, 52 supported by Masoretic Text, 150 non-aligned. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4663/ ↩︎

  28. Blake T. Ostler, "The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 66-123. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-book-of-mormon-as-a-modern-expansion-of-an-ancient-source/ ↩︎

  29. David P. Wright, "Isaiah in the Book of Mormon: Or Joseph Smith in Isaiah," in American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon, ed. Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 157-234. ↩︎

  30. Stan Spencer, "Missing Words: King James Bible Italics, the Translation of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith as an Unlearned Reader," Interpreter 38 (2020): 45-106. In 2 Nephi 16-17, italicized words were omitted at 40.5% vs. 1.1% for non-italicized words — a 40x disparity. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/missing-words-king-james-bible-italics-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-and-joseph-smith-as-an-unlearned-reader/ ↩︎ ↩︎

  31. "Mormonites," The Sun, August 18, 1831. Based on an interview apparently with Martin Harris. Reprinted and discussed in Spencer, "Missing Words," 68-72. ↩︎

  32. Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hardy acknowledges that "even chapters 1-39 underwent considerable revision and augmentation after 600 BCE" and calls the common apologetic dismissal "an inadequate (and inaccurate) response." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  33. Colby Townsend, "'The Robe of Righteousness': Exilic and Post-Exilic Isaiah in The Book of Mormon," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 55, no. 3 (2022). ↩︎

  34. Daniel T. Ellsworth, "Their Imperfect Best: Isaianic Authorship from an LDS Perspective," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 27 (2017): 1-27. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/their-imperfect-best-isaianic-authorship-from-an-lds-perspective ↩︎

  35. Brant A. Gardner, The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2011). Gardner develops the expansion model into a comprehensive translation theory, integrating linguistic, historical, and theological evidence. ↩︎

  36. Kent P. Jackson, Understanding Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible (Provo, UT: RSC, BYU, 2022). https://rsc.byu.edu/book/understanding-joseph-smiths-translation-bible ↩︎

  37. Philip Barlow, Mormons and the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 27 of the Book of Mormon's 239 chapters consist primarily of biblical quotation — roughly one in nine. Direct quotations total approximately 16,000-18,000 words of ~270,000. ↩︎

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